Saturday, August 27, 2011

Stranger than a UFO: Newly discovered planet is a diamond.

Forget the UFO sightings. The most amazing object in the sky may be a newly discovered planet made of diamond, according to information made available on August 25, 2011. Imagine a diamond five times the size of Earth. That's what scientists believe they have found in the constellation of Serpens (The Snake), 4,000 light years from our planet.

SPACE.com reports: "Using the giant Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, astrophysicists have found an incredibly dense planet comprised of crystalized carbon – the stuff of diamonds – in orbit about a pulsar."

The video below explains how this amazing planet was formed and how it was discovered. The footage on the left side of the page was posted by Marcelo Bizzarro de Andrade from Brazil; it is from his MysteryHunter2 YouTube channel. The title of the video is Transformation of a Star into a Planet: The High Time Resolution Universe Survey for Pulsars and Fast Transients Team. It was originally posted on SPACE.com

Here is a partial transcript of the video that explains how this newly discovered planet became the largest diamond in the known universe and how it was discovered. Watch the video for full details:

In November of 2008, we started a very large survey of the southern sky looking for pulsars. Pulsars are neutron stars. They weigh about a half million times as much as the earth but are only 20 kilometers across. Their rotation makes them appear to pulse once per rotation period and they spin up to an amazing 700 times per second . . .
The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it's comprised of carbon (i.e. a massive diamond) orbiting a neutron star every two hours, an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own sun.